The Facebook bubble just popped
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
This is what happens when, as an industry, we move towards "personalization". All of our "personalized" feeds allow businesses to increase their ad revenue, but it siphons us away from the rest of the world. 30 years ago, we were beholden to the large media outlets, which is also bad, but I believe we've overcorrected. All of our apps are just too personalized and they don't work hard enough to tell us what we should know, as opposed to what we want to know.
Is the same 5 or 6 conversations over and over really any less of an echo chamber than 2 or 3?
I like to come up with my own conclusions, which may - or may not - be what my demographic group "expects" me to.
When I read HN, I got the feeling, most political comments that get upvoted are phrased like "I know everyone here is a liberal leftist, BUT I have to tell you about my conservative right opinion right now, even if you don't wanna hear it!"
But I never really encountered these "liberal leftist" majority here. Just in places of the Internet that don't have anything good to say about HN.
Pro Trump articles (and anti Clinton) would appear on in the sea of other articles, but they were always black or grey within a minute or two of their appearance. Pro Clinton articles were about 50/50 throughout the day, some staying, some being voted off.
I attribute a lot of the lost articles to the feeling of "keep HN clear of politics", and a lot more to fringe/fanatical news sites making being flagged, but the overall trend of preferring Clinton to Trump was definitely visible. Bernie Sanders articles were ones which stayed up even longer than the others combined.
So, long story short, yeah, HN is still quite the political echo chamber. It's understandable: many of us share both general job descriptions and life goals; I'd hazard a guess that most even share an age group and fall within a handful of ethnicities.
Yes, reddit, HN, and the NYT, are echo chambers. But is that the problem, or the eternal-Septemeber, clueless reporting, low-signal high-noise level of the echos?
Is the problem that the LA Times publishes a propaganda piece on Copyright Office staffing? Or that it's so very hard to find high-quality commentary? With which, if you cared to, you could to discredit the dreck? Is the enormous role that groupthink plays in Washington the problem, or that even when people wish to break out of it on some topic, the information infrastructure doesn't exist to support them?
Imaging an HN which, instead of pretending its quality hadn't declined over the years, was instead trying to technically address the decline. What might be done?
Well, why couldn't a high-quality discussion community exist embedded in a reddit? A necessary condition is "we don't see the dreck". Personalization. Everyone has control of what the site looks like to them. So you can be fine with reddit-style puns on topic A, but only see insightful expertise on topic B. And I can make the opposite choice. On Tuesdays.
A core idea of machine-learning-based human-computer-hybrid systems, is that the system learns about the people at the same time that the people help the system execute the process. The candy machine bribing CS undergraduates to grade CS 101 exams, learns both about the answers being graded, and about how much to trust different people's grading of different subjects.
And the system can recognize when it needs advice. "This clearly goes in bucket M, and this in bucket N, but hmm... I'm not sure where to put this one. Hey, statistically well-executed sample of people, which bucket?".
Perhaps it's overly optimistic to think that people might choose to not live in mind ghettos if given the choice. But we won't have a choice until we get better at cultivating quality. Instead of chance "Oh, look over there, by the petunias! A thoughtful thread! Oh, no, it's dead now".
* Most of the liberal stuff in my FB/Twitter feeds are from NYT or Washington Post
* Back in the day, consumers of traditional media probably zoned out of TV bits/skimmed over newspaper articles that they didn't agree with
The whole "echo chamber" thing seems like a meme to me. "In the olden days, we used to go to ye olde coffee store and have intellectual conversations with randos with different political beliefs."
And if you were watching the election coverage the night of you could very discernibly see the change in the commentators narrative from "yay! Clinton!" to the shock of "Wait, Trump?" to "Those dirty rednecks! (er ... uneducated white folk)" as their reality was changing before them.
It wasn't JUST Facebook.
The sense I got is the sooner the conclusion is reached, the sooner people stop watching.
I take this behavior as an example of motivated reasoning in action.
"This election was much more about ‘Duck Dynasty’ than ‘Saturday Night Live’."
Hell hath no fury like an elite liberal scorned.
For a lot of innocent people outside the US, ironically for a lot of Muslims, HRC's status quo was literally lethal. As someone outside the US, who finds Trump's views unacceptable, and is in Europe, and in no direct danger of US induced violence, I can tell you this: he was not the candidate who enjoyed practically unanimous support of the US industry of death (the so called defense industry), and the whole state military and political neocon apparatus, all the while announcing to try real hard to get in an open confrontation with the other nuclear superpower. In that regard, I am somewhat relieved, and despite what the media might be telling you, a lot of other people are.
I live in Nevada - a "battleground state" - and I saw almost no pro-Hillary commercials or campaign flyers. Rather, she ran almost entirely on an anti-Trump platform. She didn't think anyone wanted to know her stances on the issues. Running that kind of campaign is dangerous when your own likability is a serious issue.
I've seen both shows, and it seems to me like he's saying this election was more about rural/middle America that it was about urban/coastal America, just based on the typical viewers of the shows.
To me, being from a rural area doesn't mean you're racist, or uneducated - even if you don't have a degree, there are plenty of other ways to learn, and also plenty of useful things to learn that aren't taught in any college.
But - I'm Canada, not the U.S., so although I get a ton of exposure to U.S. media up here, it's definitely possible I'm lacking some important bits of context that would help me understand better.
The DNC has no one to blame but themselves.
Nearly half of voters, not the country.
Many of us who are incredulous about this election not because a Republican won but because Donald Trump won.
We're shocked that you can mock a war hero, a person with a disability, a sexual assault victim in the public sphere and still get elected.
It's not our politics that are shocked it's our sensibilities.
Edit: sorry about the original swear.
> To make matters worse, social media is a poor platform for getting people to understand opposing views. Another Pew study found that only 20 percent of users modified their stance on a social or political issue because of what they saw on social media. ...
OK, but did people "modify their stance on a social or political issue" due to newspapers? TV? Or did they just pay attention to things that reinforced their existing biases?
There may be a good criticism of FB, but this isn't it. And a scientific study (not sure what that would look like, but whatever) might well show the opposite.
They blame social media for allowing the Trump memes to warp people's opinion. They're starting to put the pieces together on unemployment and blame tech automation for taking jobs and not offering a replacement, especially in the heartland. They're angry with Silicon Valley execs for not putting up any visible fight against Trump. They're starting to see how clustering all the best paying jobs in major cities leaves people outside of the bubble desperate, seeing desperate solutions. A tidal wave of rage against the election is about to be directed towards the tech industry, it's just a matter of time.
And many on the left outside of the valley bubble really thought that a boom in the left-leaning Bay Area meant that there were powerful people there who had their backs in all of this. They feel very hurt that tech seemed to sit on the sidelines through the election, and in some regards pretty much enabled and profited off the mass-dissemination of misinformation.
So it's not just about corporate greed this time. It's about information, disruption, workforce automation, and the responsibilities that come from building and wielding powerful information tools.
As a tech worker, I've been responsible for eliminating far more American jobs, many in the heartland, than any Mexican immigrant ever has. What have I done to deal with the consequences of that? Many, many people have been laid off because of the things I've built in the last 15 years. I ignored them, told myself they weren't valuable anyhow. We owe these people solutions for basic income, we owe them more opportunities for jobs out in the red states, the red counties of america. We created this. All of it.
In short, former cool-kid Adbusters "meme warrior", accustomed to culture-jamming the elitist logics of "late capitalism", finds himself alarmingly surrounded by the shadowy Meme Magicians of Esoteric Kekism. Meanwhile the Hillary-friendly corporate media looks on, powerless to sink Trump with criticism, but equally unable to stop themselves from giving him free publicity. Suddenly, he finds the corporate mass media to be a "protective membrane between the public and overly toxic ideas."
How the turntables, as they say.
I think what's really interesting is the difficulty of discerning how effective this social media meme politics actually is, or to systematize its internal structure. This isn't a TV ad campaign or a stump speech, it's a distributed, continuous cacophony. So how can you tell whether it's what's boosting the campaign, or whether it's just an epiphenomenon of an already-successful campaign? This makes social media campaigning seem very threatening - when you can't tell how it works, who knows how powerful it might really be?
The problem is that virtually everyone dramatically underestimates the power of viral manipulation. People believe that they have the power to make their own choices, that they have their own thoughts. But the truth is, they really don't. At all. Manipulating a tribe of humans to your cause is all just a matter of effort and patience. My worldview is shaped by the information I have. I just happen to spend a lot of time consuming complex information. Most people don't have that luxury. So they're completely vulnerable. Social media is powerful beyond the capabilities that I think anyone ever envisioned. And it's begun to take on a new life of it's own.
Otherwise really absurd article, agreed.
But yeah.
Everytime i see some of the hardliners posting something political it will be completely ignored, or at max liked by some other hardliners.
If someone posts a article about vegan or animal rights or shit, thats the kind of stuff that goes viral in my circles.
I read that as vegan rights or animal rights...
Not sure how characteristic that is for folks, but that's how I found myself consuming news eventually, and a big part of why I quit it.
Oh, it was strange all right.
Well, that's one hell of a bubble you're living in.
There is barely political or relevant stuff on my feed, and as said i never heard anyone say "did you read _that_ on facebook?" when talking about something in the news.
If that helps you: my circle is mostly from Austria and Switzerland
So it's not unreasonable to say you're inside a really special bubble, if you've never heard anyone using Facebook as a news source.
Edit:// To further clearify: Nether are any of my facebook friends, nether have i ever been there or plan to. I have no relation with the U.S. i was just making the point that Facebook might simply is not the right place to find information.
Around here Facebook lost its appeal some time ago and mutated to a semi relevant social network. People (especially teens) use a lot Whatsapp & Snapchat now. We mostly stopped having requests for facebook marketing campaigns as well since a few years. And businesses slowly stopped to maintain their Facebook sites.
Please dont project your english environment into my german bubble. Thanks
You are probably in a Facebook bubble without even realising it...
I really see where you are going, and i see that we all are in our personal Facebook bubble. But my point stands that Facebook simply does not have the same relevance at here that it seems to have in the U.S. People here read news, many even young, read actual newspapers. There is not so much place for facebook in a system that already works.
And before someone asks, yes our newspapers are heavily favoring too. But thats not the point.
Well there you go again: at last count 1.26 billion people check Facebook daily, and they're not all American. The figures in German speaking countries are huge too, your personal usage is simply not very representative of most people's.
That's the perception tilt that doesn't seem to be reflected in the media
For those who don't want to follow the link: "individuals convey preferences that differ from what they genuinely want"
It doesn't need a Wikipedia article nor a term for it. It has been around since the beginning of time.
What is new is that this sort of environment is taking hold in the US, which is unfortunate. And this forum is as guilty as any other. People lambasted Peter Thiel for speaking his mind and voting his wallet. They demanded his head and spoke of repercussions.
That's what you get when you behave that way. When people are threatened when they speak out, they just wont speak in public, but it doesn't change what they believe. Our society is worse off for silencing their voices.
Very true unfortunately. That's not all of HN of course. Many of us supported Thiel and his ideas, or else thought it was worth having an opposing voice around even if they disagreed with it.
I wrote an essay on Peter Thiel's ideas and (partly about) how the Media misunderstood him here:
https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the-wolfe-b8de...
It was composed from a chain of HN comments before the election went to Trump, so I can credibly state that I saw a media malfunction with reality on the cards.
I was watching his press conference from a few days ago at the National Press Club event, and I really did Laugh Out Loud when he said (paraphrasing), "You know, this is pretty much the first time I'm not making a contrarian stance, I mean literally how can I be a contrarian when half the population agree with me, and for this I get the flak? Unbelievable!".
Together with the investment in Seasteading, this has been incredibly high impact for comparatively minor sums of money. Thiel has managed managed to make himself the only venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who appeals to the majority of the working class. That is power. He'll be reaping dividends from that for the rest of his life.
This is because many serious inventions and innovations were created by the working class, not the middle class as they appear to think today. In fact historically (and I would argue currently too) the middle classes and elites looked down on entrepreneurship. Entreprenurship is seen as being unprofessional. Most engineering was created by working class with the aristocrats holding up the exploration of science. The water mills, the steam engines, these were not created by the kind of people who studied at universities. We no longer understand our own past.
This may sound like an attempt at provocation, but I swear it is not. I really do think many of the best innovators and inventors have a working class way of looking at the world.
Let us take something that isn't directly in Silicon Valley's ballpark. Tiny Houses.
All the non-cosmetic innovations I've seen in Tiny Houses have been created by working class people.
The majority of Tiny Houses are created by young aspirational middle class or those who want to retire without worrying. It is especially gratifying to see many young women picking up the hammer to forge something for themselves. I saw one who built a VOC-free house recently and that is impressive if you know anything about building.
Despite this, the only major differences between most builds are cosmetic. People really are afraid of being different despite being adventurous enough to live differently to most. There is a finite amount of adventurousness people have and it is easily exhausted.
The names in italics are Youtube channels if you wanted to inspect what I'm talking about.
Esket Tiny House is built by a carpenter, and he has built a magnificent curved roof when everybody else went with a standard gable roof. If you're perceptive you'll notice that a Tiny House only has 13 ft 6 inches to play with. So logically changing the roof shape would hugely improve the living space in the loft area. Yet they choose not to change it.
Tiny House Customs is another working class Joe (framer). He has cleverly hidden the trailer's wheels and tow bars so it doesn't even appear to be a potentially mobile structure.
Life in a Box (electrician) has introduced the concept of a rain screen, despite being in Arizona! Everybody's builds (in the more rainy regions) are going to have the siding rot off in five years! This is smart.
The Not So Tiny House (power plant operator but definitely working class) has very cleverly hidden his trailer using a faux rock skirt. It now just looks like a regular house on a foundation. It is a rather brilliant solution.
The reason why I mention these is because there are very few working class people building Tiny Houses. I think that is a shame. However the thing to notice here, is that when they do build, they build them very differently to the cookie-cutter approach most middle class people do.
In retrospect, all their innovations are extremely obvious. That is quite curious.
I think this says something pretty profound. There is something about being middle class that could damage your ability to integrate innovations into real life. I realize this is anecdotal but in retrospect I have the feeling I see this pattern everywhere in life.
One explanation could be that: once your comfort increases, your comfort 'zone' decreases. I think this could be a powerful explanation for why so few Silicon Valley companies are truly inventive despite being a Mecca for all kinds of talent and enterprise.
As Peter Thiel points out: all kinds of clever young minds go to Harvard, and despite that they keep electing to join industries just as bubbles are bursting. That is not an accident, it is culture.
tldr; When you think of diversity, maybe think of the working class also. Maybe they have something to add nobody else does.
However, formalizing the concept this way allowed the further step of the preference cascade, and that, while also not exactly new in practice, was a more enlightening concept.
Hilarious defence of their work in recent tweet
"Clinton came within 2 points of 307 electoral votes, in which case polls would have been right in 49 of 50 states. "
ie. If the results had been different, our prediction would have been correct.
First, that comment is about the polls, not their model.
Second, it's called a polling error. It's actually a thing.
This election happened to be extremely sensitive to polling errors due to the nature of the electoral college and the fact that a number of key races were extremely tight.
When an average poll has a 3% margin of error, and you factor in state-level correlations (and the fact that the state level polls tend to have more variable quality than national polls), a slight error results in a huge swing.
Which is the entire point they're making, if you're willing to set aside the snark and read what they wrote (since it's actually, you know, interesting and informative).
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundi...
If you're talking about Taleb's "black swan" style uncertainty, that's specifically the kind that cannot be taken into account.
If you're talking about events being correlated instead of independent, that's what set 538 apart from other poll-aggregators: Nate gave Trump a relatively high chance of winning, because a polling error in one state would likely indicate the same polling error in every other state.
At one point, FiveThirtyEight was forecasting/predicting that Clinton had a 66% chance of winning the election. If there were infinite parallel universes that veered off from that moment in time, their implication is that she would win the election in two out of three times. Taleb is saying that is nonsense, that there is more variability than that.
Of course, Taleb's model wouldn't drive page views or get people excited. FiveThirtyEight gives voters a reason to check-in daily on how their candidate is doing in polls, but it is misleading as a forecasting tool.
He didn't criticize them for underestimating uncertainty, but for being too uncertain.
Of course, this is just a weird year when a third-party had a shot at the 5% and all of them sabotaged themselves by picking people who were uniquely unlikely to get votes. Could have been the setup for a 2020 three party run.
1) you would have to be insane to run a business and have a Trump sign in your window unless you were hoping for an insurance settlement.
I've only seen this form of complete isolation as part of feminist "no platform"-ing (basically: actively excluding speakers because of their political views, regardless of the topic of the conference or occasion) before. But this time it wasn't simply about fringe extremists (e.g. racial supremacists) but about all supporters of the final candidate of one of the two major parties.
I hope this is the end of this practice rather than the start of something worse. Demonising half (or a third, depending on how you measure) the population is not how you fix social issues, especially if it desensitises people to slurs you will still need to label the real extremists.
Trump in particular is so far out of the bounds of normal politics that to many people, support for Trump appears no different than support for, say, Mussolini. It may only be fringe extremists playing the racial supremacy song, but half the country is marching along to the beat. At that point it doesn't matter what your private reasons for supporting a Mussolini or Franco or Trump are - you're still a collaborator. The justification for boycotts etc comes from that point of view.
It's a difficult problem - the left (such as it is) needs to find some kind of productive path forward, but I'm not convinced that pandering to the sensitivities of people who have no intention to reciprocate is at all useful.
Ex falso quod libet. The statistical mechanics can be rock solid, but if the data is garbage or the model is garbage then the prediction will likely be garbage. Hiding behind mechanical minutiae is no excuse for the overtly bold and wrong predictions.
As with credit agencies... "We do not give advice on investments", yeah but everybody invests based on your ratings.
There's no better reality-based approach than aggregating polls across the political spectrum. But who would have thought that all polls would be wrong in the same direction?
I wasn't predicting a Trump win out of bias. I'm very liberal, and my friends are too. However, none of my friends believed me. I'm not going to say I was confident in my prediction, but I thought the race was much closer than it appeared. I talk to a lot of people in my job, and I could just tell that a lot of people would be far more okay with Trump as a president than they were willing to overtly say.
I'm not saying I'm some election analysis god, but I felt like people were galvanizing Trump support by refusing to acknowledge Trump as a legitimate candidate, which I think resonated with a lot of people who felt that their concerns were not being taken legitimately. The HRC campaign focused on the negative aspects of his campaign, but his support came from the fact that people felt that Trump cared about their concerns.
Don't believe me? When you look how they are constructed it becomes clear. Too bad for Clinton campaign she was highly unlikable and even the most expensive campaign in history couldn't help her.
The scarier thing is that for the next 10-20 years, boomers in the rust belt are going to swing republican unless dems can get a Bernie. To me, whatever democrat wins the michigan primary, is their candidate above all else.
That being said, I saw a lot of arguments on Facebook about Trump. I don't think the echo chamber is as complete as claimed. I think a lot of the issue is not that social media provides an echo chamber, but that social mores prevent people from voicing controversial views in large groups of people who disagree with you. So, assuming the people in your friends list are from a similar socioeconomic background, a substantial majority of them probably support one candidate over the other. So the only posts you'll see about the other person are from the least "well behaved" members of your social circle.
I think the larger issue is that the quality of the conversation on social networks is just terrible. A five-minute conversation with a stranger has more depth to it than a status with 100 comments on it. Online discussions are basically won by whichever side's memes appeal to the broader audience.
It also seemed like the celebrity endorsements had the opposite effect. Some of the people who I've met who spoke ill of the celebrities used language that I don't think they normally use. It has been quite odd.
Definitely not that new. For example, pollsters in France have for decades been applying a "coefficient of shame" to account for Le Pen voters' underreporting.
First of all, yes, they got it wrong, in that they gave Clinton a higher chance of winning than Trump. They didn't give him a 0 chance, and a model that has 67%ish certainty should be "wrong" about 1 in 3 times. They were better than the other major forecasts, insofar as they gave Trump the highest chance of winning.
I respect Nate Silver for his opposition to non-data-driven media narratives. In 2012, when the media was calling the race super close, Nate called them out for making a media circus when the race was actually looking really good for Obama. In this race, he did the opposite, constantly pointing out how likely a 30% chance was and how big of a polling error there could be (and also how many undecided voters there were). He also called out herding (the tendency of pollsters to not publish outliers) when he saw a ton Clinton+3 and Clinton+4 leads in the week before the election. His forecast may have been wrong, but his instincts are pretty good.
Regarding the shy-Trump effect, we didn't see this play out in the primaries (Trump often underperformed his polls), which makes me skeptical. It might be that with all the reluctant republicans felt a need to vote for him in the general election, the effect got played up. Personally, I think there are 2 big problems in polling as we do it today:
- Not enough pollsters are polling in Spanish. From the polling we do have, we know that Spanish speaking latinos vote very differently from English speaking latinos.
- Our methods for finding people are a mess. Phone polls often use land lines (Cell numbers are often unlisted and may belong to people who live in other states despite their area code) which prejudice them towards the demographic of "people who still have/answer a land line". Internet polls suffer self-selection bias. We need a way to randomly sample people without them making the first move to join a poll. This problem needs to be solved.
Lastly, I want to point out that even Trump's campaign didn't see this coming. No one (except Bill Mitchell's yard sign and Halloween mask model) saw this coming. We have a lot of work to do to fix polling.
They were better than the other major forecasts,
insofar as they gave Trump the highest chance of
winning.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-usc-latimes-poll-2...
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-leave-th...
Reading this honestly makes me question why I read HN.
Read Talebs tweets:
https://mishtalk.com/2016/08/07/nassim-telab-blasts-nate-sil...
Funny how times change, eh?
Alternate theory: People did not lie to the pollsters -- but there was voting fraud, and Trump didn't win.
When the next election rolled around, when Obama won, they didn't make a peep about the electronic voting machines, which were still in use, nor about the possibility of voting fraud. Neither did the Republicans. Nor did anyone mention these issues in the following election, when Obama won again. It was only Trump speaking up about it which brought the issue back in to the news. But the possibility of massive voting fraud has been there all along, and will continue to be there for the following elections, as long as electronic voting machines are still in use.
Now, why does the mainstream of both the Democratic and Republican parties permit these machines to continue to be used? That's a very good question. The consipracy minded might speculate that they might have an agreement between them, and that US elections have become simply political theater, with the real decisions as to who gets to hold office being made through other means, and by people other than the voters.
The question is whether Trump supporters were better at cheating than Clinton supporters, or better at covering their tracks. Even if nobody suspected fraud, we should still be doing randomized checks for it, in a transparent, publicly-auditable way.
My hypothesis is that voting fraud is endemic, but that it only rarely influences the results of any election. I suspect that most of it is done by crackers for hire or by people already heavily invested in politics who happen to have the necessary skills.
It just seems like such a simple, boring, and yet insanely high-risk hack that no one would bother doing it just for the giggles of getting Ivanna Tinkle elected as county dogcatcher. Also, in order to pull off a significant advantage, you would need a conspiracy of multiple actors in several different counties, and the more participants you have, the less likely it is you will be able to keep it secret.
Tyler Durden (of Fight Club) could silently steal an election with a vote fraud conspiracy, but no actual, living person could--not until all the votes are cast on network-connected machines, anyway.
It doesn't have to be one person. It could be multiple teams of people.
They don't have to intervene all over the country, either. They could make a huge difference by affecting a relatively small number of votes in a handful of battleground states where the race is very close.
In the case of Bush v Gore, it would have been sufficient to make a difference in only one state.
For real people, the more people you add for operations, the more you have to add for security and cleanup. Beyond a certain point, you just can't keep everybody quiet without extreme measures, which are themselves likely to be noticed.
Secret conspiracies have to be small, otherwise someone eventually gets disgruntled or has an attack of conscience and spills the beans.
Even large, public conspiracies, like the classified documents protection system, eventually develop leaks, and it is already really expensive to operate before accounting for cleanup up after spies or whistleblowers.
So if we ever reach the point where five people or less could remotely rig the vote for every county in Florida, I have to not only assume that it is being done every election, but also that multiple groups may be stepping on each other's toes while doing it. Previously, the traditional ways of rigging the vote are right out in the open. You get people likely to vote against you stricken from the voter register. You enter fake ballots in the name of someone not likely to vote, such as the recently deceased. You sabotage polling places in urban areas such that voter throughput is reduced, and lines grow around the block. You get local cops out on the streets, giving out traffic citations to selected people that may be on their way to vote. I have even seen sudden construction activity on election day obstructing the sole entrance to a polling place.
Those are nasty, but at least people can seek redress for the misbehavior that they can see.
Nassim Taleb has been calling BS on FiveThirtyEight's methods and models for months: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/762032883414556674
He's now gone as far as calling FiveThirtyEight "clueless" and posted further comparisons of his model with theirs: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/binary%20foreca...
He has a point that the chances of winning shouldn't shift so rapidly, but a rapidly moving gauge is a decent indicator of uncertainty.
There is a need in the internet age to educate people on how to consume information. When we had fewer news organizations, information was more controlled. It was done by professionals with years of training.
While there's a lot of benefit in providing more voices and more outlets, there's a real danger of spreading misinformation propped up by false equivalences as to what qualifies as a professional news organization. I'm not sure the answer other than education.
Hardly. I'd say it accurately represented the view distribution of my social group, which I infrequently agree with.
> But beyond that, it turns a blind eye to the nature of the content within its walls.
Is this article claiming that FB should censor more? It's also wrong; I know of several Facebook pages that have been unpublished for being politically unsavory (from Facebook's perspective, of course).
I'm not exactly sure what this article is supposed to convince us of.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/10/facebook-admits-it-must-do...
Most of us are shocked that this could happen not that it did happen.
My assumption wasn't that because no one I interacted with on social media was supporting him therefore he can't win.
My assumption was that people are too basically decent for him to win.
There's a lot of ground between knowing something can happen and being emotionally prepared for it to happen.
I wrote in Bernie, and I'd rather have Trump and a rebuild the DNC from scratch -- from the far left, than see Clinton -- the epitome of corruption rise to power. We might as well let mob-bosses run for President.
I actually don't recall Fox predicting it either.
But isn't it kind of weird that you both supposed they were the only ones who might have gotten it correct, but also that they were not "real news"? Didn't "real news" just let you down hardcore?
It doesn't do any good to say "The deviation of reporting from reality means I have to re-examine my views" if you secretly include the caveat "as long as none of my views have to change".
That said, I've got no particular reason to give you that Fox should be given any more credit than any other major news source. But I'd submit that isn't because you should give Fox more credit, but because you should adjust your view of the others to match your current view of Fox. There isn't that huge a difference between Fox and, say, CNN. But there's a lot more people who will mouth agreement with that sentence, but then don't follow through with their actions. CNN is trash, and it's more dangerous for those who are generally inclined to agree with them than those who aren't. And so on for all or at least almost all of the other "real news sources". You need to follow through, stop watching, stop trusting things they say, and really stop trusting things they say that make you feel good.
(BTW, as for "what's my suggestion" then, at the moment I don't have a place I can point at and say "If they say it, I trust it.")
https://www.fwdeveryone.com/t/e1rtmBSJR16mkcCRlqmWwQ/lifehac...
There were good reasons to predict that George W Bush, an embarrassing, arrogant, stupid buffoon who got the country in to two disastrous wars and failed to prevent 9/11, who had massive protests against him from all over the country would not get elected for a second term. But he did (arguably with the help of voting fraud, but regardless of how he got there, he still served a second term).
Many were surprised when an actor, Ronald Reagan, was elected as President. Another actor was elected Governor of California, and arguably may have become President had he been born in the US. A wrestler became Governor of Minnesota.
Most analysts, and even American intelligence agencies, were shocked by the swift downfall of the Soviet Union.
In the 1960's, when Segregation was in full swing, many could not imagine that it would ever end. They thought, as the song goes, "That's just the way it is. Some things will never change". But it did end, and in relatively short order. Some argue the US is still not fully desegregated, but in many important ways it is.
For my part, when Bush Jr managed to get a second term in office, I stopped trying to predict the political future. So now I'm no longer surprised. Any idiot or asshole can get elected President in the US, and anything, no matter how unlikely, can happen.
It reminds me of when the Yippies nominated a pig for President.[1] They did it as a joke, but the US has been headed in that direction ever since.
Urrrmm, did you know that Reagan was the Governor of California for 2 terms, from 1967 to 1974?
Nicholas Nassim Taleb's Twitter and Medium are excellent reads these days.
In swing states, 1% more votes could have made the difference. Florida for instance was very close.
In addition, the democratic party acted in a very biased way against Bernie. Superdelegates also didn't care about what candidate was more popular in each state.
Discrimination at work may also be about free speech.
Most organizations have a very understandable right to not want to be associated with that. It's called a PR disaster. Somehow Trump is immune, and I will never know how.
In the end..
clinton: 59,938,290 votes
trump: 59,704,886 votes
59million liked all new age sjw stuff
59million other people didn't
That is such an absurd and reductionist dismissal of this election that is no different than the equally wrong people saying "59 million people liked all the old sexist, homophobic, racist and xenophobic attitudes, and 59 million other people didn't"
What you are doing here is just perpetuating the problems that have plagued this election cycle and made it so people are completely unable to discuss real issues.
Start with a reasonable statement. Back that up with some interesting facts. Then drop a bomb in the room and wait for the aftermath. Pretty nicely crafted, all things considered...
The last year has ripped covers off the culture war that the US has been slowly boiling in like a frog. BLM and Trump aren't one offs, there are tons of people with serious gripes in this country, and for myself I'd rather call out the BS that obscures this than just sit here and let it stand unchallenged.
I agree. Throwing a derogatory zinger out there like "SJW" (which is unquestionably a dog whistle... anyone who would claim otherwise is being dishonest) does nothing to enhance public discourse, and it's about time we all worked to recognize and discourage that kind of behaviour while we all try to have honest, forthright conversations that help everyone understand each other a little better.
That is what you meant, right?
I'm just so sick of all the navel gazing going on between the Bernie or Bust'ers, the Establishment Dems, the NeverTrumps, the Pro-Trumps, the Libertarians, and on and on and on.
Every last one of them is pushing some absurdly reductionist hot take argument in their bubbles and papering over the real issues plaguing people.
I'm as liberal as they get, but Trump appealed to a broad demographic. Reducing it to "uneducated whites" does a disservice to the very foundations of American democracy, as it dismisses out of hand the very real concerns of nearly 50% of the American electorate.
It would behoove everyone, including those in the media and the political system, to step back and get in touch with the values and concerns of those folks. Without that, the US is only going to become more polarized... and I'm not sure how much longer that can go on.
Pre election they were all over trump. post election they have completely flipped and are blaming democrats/hillary/etc. When in reality we have a near perfect balance of competing views
This is for the second time that Dems have lost this way, the last time was during Al Gore vs Bush
Due to the way the electoral college gives small population states more electoral votes comparatively, votes in small population states have more weight.
Ratified by 10 blue states representing 165 electoral votes, and zero red states. Most of the bluest states (CA, MA, NY, RI, DC, WA) ratified it during the Obama administration.
The campaigns would have done things differently (like dems not ignore TX and repubs not ignore CA).
This is more explained more thoroughly and eloquently by Prof Adler: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
There is still 4 million votes that are being counted. Projection even from CNN is that Trump wins the popular vote.
[0] https://mishgea.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/geographic-lands.... [1] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-10/trumps-geographic-l....
Reporting 65% chances of a Clinton victory doesn't mean you're saying Clinton will win.
All: when commenting about inflammatory topics on HN, please take extra care to be more civil and substantive, not less. We're trying to go against entropy here. That takes energy.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12922188 and marked it off-topic.
I realize its not the complete message, but its appearantly the subtle message they want to bring over.
Bill Clinton was disbarred, impeached, and he sexually exploited young female interns in the White house and was also accused of sexual crimes by many women. Hillary Clinton defended him in all of these things.
The Clinton Foundation is a front (masquerading as a charity) for political favors and payments. The Clintons are political/criminal cronies enriching themselves while impoverishing others.
While they claim that average Americans are too 'uneducated' and 'low information' (i.e. stupid) to understand these sophisticated political topics, we all see right through it.
Enough is enough. Follow the same rules and laws that we all have to and treat us fairly and we'll vote for you. Abuse us like this and we won't. It's that simple.